Design, machining and characterization of the components required for the manufacture of a supercapacitor
Jesús M. Rodríguez-Rego, Antonio Macı́as-Garcı́a, Laura Mendoza-Cerezo, Antonio Díaz-Parralejo, Juan Pablo Carrasco-Amador
Abstract
One of the main European objectives is to promote the change of consumption towards renewable energies, which have shown a remarkable worldwide growth, the problem lies in the fact that the technologies used, which have been developed very rapidly during these years, do not have sufficiently advanced energy storage systems. The main objectives of this study have been the design and manufacture of supercapacitors that do not suffer corrosion processes and with higher performance. To this end, supercapacitor connectors have been designed and machined with different materials in order to find the one that best ensures the non-influence of corrosion processes and ensures correct parallelism. In addition, different carbonaceous materials have been tested for the manufacture and subsequent textural, chemical and morphological characterization of the different electrodes and, finally, charge/discharge and cyclic voltammetry tests have been carried out to analyze which parameters are key for the manufacture and improvement of the supercapacitors. The results showed that the proposed supercapacitor manufacturing methodology is highly recommended to avoid problems derived from poor assembly, reproducibility of results or problems due to the appearance of galvanic couples. Moreover, the electrodes tested showed very interesting results, as demonstrated by the voltammograms, the chronopotentiograms and the specific energy values, the latter showing that the capacitance exerts a notable influence on the energy values, with the PCO1000C/Graphite and PCO1000C/rGO samples showing the highest energy values.